 Rhaid fawr, rym ni'n hygynnu'n gael, rwy'n rhaid i'w cystersiwxulio. Rydyn ni'n ddim yn rhaids gywethaf oherwydd bod hwn o'r fawr a'i gilydd mwyn i gyd ac i'n layffeu'r hon ddechrau'n gwynghwil, bod hwn i'n môl yn gwybll, gydechrau'rwr o'r drwng. Rwy'n gofio'n ddim yn y gweithio rhywbeth, ac mae'n dd telethau bod ni'n ddych chi'n gyflwyngwyl ar fath, a'u ddweud rhaid i lawrau unig. Mae'r ffrom angen, i wnaeth gyda'r ffordd. Felly, mae'n gweithio'r rhaid i'r ffordd ac yn gweithio'r ffyrdd yn gweithio'r ffordd, felly rwy'n meddwl er mwyn yn ddod o'r gynllun â'r gwerthau. Felly, rhaid i'n gweithio'r ffordd. Mae'r gwaith ar y llai yn y llwyngau. Mae'n gweithio i'r fordd yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gwerthau. Mae'n gweithio'r gwaith i'r ffordd yn gweithio'r gwaith. Siarth's inaugurals have a nice sense of occasion I think, it's a ceremony, we're all dressed up, it's a reed to passage for the speaker, clearly one he's been through before, it's a celebration but it's also I think for me, most important of all it's an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole Siarth's community, I learn a lot when I come to these inaugurals and it's really good to hear what everyone's doing. Now just to make sure it's an enjoyable event, if you've not already done so, do turn off your mobile phone and do please note where the fire exits are, there and there and there, there's no fire drills planned, if the fire alarm goes off, do leave quickly. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture, it's the fifth one of the 2013-14 inaugural lecture series and it's one of a pair in a sense. Last week we had Professor Sayez talking on hybrid capitalism and the development of the welfare state in Asia with Professor Singh giving the vote a thanks and this week we have Professor Singh talking on democracy and religious minorities minorities in India, a long term view with Professor Sayez giving the vote a thanks. I'm sure like last week's lecture this is going to be particularly enlightening and for me it's especially good to see Goharpal in an academic context, the two of us spend our time deeply mired in managerial and administrative things most of the time and actually giving the opportunity to hear a colleague as an academic is really good for me. Professor Singh will be introduced by Professor Christopher Shackle and following his first degree in Persian and subsequent postgraduate training in social anthropology at Oxford, Christopher joined the academic staff of SAS and I hope I got the dates right in 1966. He was appointed Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia in 1986, he remained a member of the South Asian department so subsequently all served the departments of origins until his retirement in 2007. He served as pro director from 1997 to 2003 including a stint as acting director of SAS and again he was saying to me earlier that he discovered as acting director of SAS that people treated him differently but he wasn't clear whether this was better or worse just differently. He was also elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1990. The voter thanks as I said will be delivered by Professor Lawrence Sayers who is a professor of political economy of Asia in the department of politics here. He is also co director of the centre of politics of energy security as well as the standing group of the third world politics of the European consortium political research. He's the co editor with Goharpal Singh of New Dimensions of Politics in India, United Progressive Alliance and Power. As you might have gathered Goharpal and Lawrence have worked together on a number of projects. Again it's one of the reasons why these are a pair of lectures. We're very grateful to you both Lawrence, Christopher for being part of today's proceedings. At the end after the voter thanks you're invited upstairs to reception the Brunei suite for some wine and canapes. So I've finished to introduce Professor Singh over to Professor Shackle, over to you Chris. Oh yes okay but it all means please. Thank you Paul there's opening remarks. It's always a rather special honour actually to be asked to introduce an inaugural lecture by fellow academic. It's also nice to be back in Sirus at one point in my life when I was served here as pro director. I seem to be standing in this position quite regularly, often thinking as I am now. How fortunate it was that my own appointment to a Sirus chair came to time when the then director decided to do away with inaugurals for a while. So I was never compelled to lay my own academic cards on the table. But it's always good to hear others reflecting on the important subjects to which they devoted their careers. I've enjoyed many inaugurals over the years and I'm sure we're all in for a treat this evening. Professor Gulhopal Singh was educated at Charles King College Leicester before studying for a BSc economy and government in history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. At an undergraduate at LSE he was twice awarded the prestigious Harold Lasky's scholarship by the Department of Government. Following graduation he completed an MA in industrial relations at the University of Warwick before returning to LSE to undertake doctoral research. But after two years into a thesis on industrial democracy and the Labour Party he was finally convinced that the dual practices of British political life would never match the fascination and drama of Indian politics. He tells me that Sirus played a critical role in this conversion since it was after attending seminars at the school of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies that he changed his research topic to focus on Indian communism with special reference to Punjab. Gulhopal began his academic career in 1987 with an appointment in the Department of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College. This was followed a year later by lectureship in humanities at De Montfort University. During a decade at De Montfort he established an international reputation as a leading scholar in Asian studies, a recognition that led to being offered a chair in Sikh studies at University of Michigan in the age of 36. Despite this tempting offer he decided to forego the charm to the American Midwest in view of the subsequent history of that chair, wise decision I may say, and opted for the English militants instead. In 1999 he eventually moved to the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Hull to become the first holder of the CRPARIC chair in Indian politics. He combined this post with the directorship of the Centre of Study of Indian Politics and the Bangor Bandhu Centre, named after the founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mkhilipur Rahman. The move north, however, proved unsettling. When the University of Birmingham advertised a newly created chair in interreligious relations, endowed by the Dinshal family, he had no hesitation in applying, despite the reservation of his close colleagues that changing disciplines would seriously damage his career development. For him, against the backdrop of 9-11, the move to a Department of Theology seemed natural, given his research interests in religious nationalism, multiculturalism and the political management of religious diversity. As the holder of the Dinshal chair in interreligious relations at Birmingham, Gurharpal led some major interreligious relations initiatives, following developments after 9-11 and 7-7. He worked closely with local actors to better promote interfaith relations. He pioneered an MA in politics and religion. From 2005-2011, he was the deputy director of the £3.5 million DFID-funded research consortium on religiousness and development, which focused on India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Tanzania. A search for fresh pastures led to his coming to SOAS in 2011, when he was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He appears to have responded well to the challenges facing the school and the faculty, and his achievements so far, I understand, include the creation of the School of Arts and a significant contribution to and project leadership of the £20 million endowment from the AlfaWood Foundation for the development of the South East Asian Arts programme. Professor Singh has published prolifically. He is the author and co-editor of 12 volumes, the most recent of which is entitled New Dimensions of Politics in India, UPA in power. Among his landmark publications are Ethnic Conflict in India, The Partition of India and Seek in Britain. He is currently engaged in two major projects, a volume on India's troubled democracy and understanding Sikh nationalism. Besides all this, he's also been the inspiration behind the founding of two major journals, The International Journal of Punjab Studies published by SAGE and Seek Formations published by Rutledge. All of us who work in the fields of Sikh and Punjab studies know him particular gratitude for these key publications, which are really sort of markers in the field. This is not an unimpressive output for someone who was accused by a hostile review of his first book of writing it only to get a feather in his turban. Professor Singh is a regular broadcaster for the local, national and international media on the politics of South Asia of multiculturalism and ethnic conflict. He writes frequently in the British and Indian media. In 2012 he was selected as a panellist by the UN's Human Rights Council for debate on human rights and multiculturalism. To his credit he informs me he turned down an invitation from Vladimir Putin to attend the Global Policy Forum in 2011, but also in the same year he accepted one from David Cameron to celebrate the Sikh New Year in Downing Street. Gaurapal lived with his wife Raghoketan Oedby Lestesha. He first arrived in the city of Leicester as an eight-year-old almost 40 years ago. His long association with Leicester was well documented and was recently featured in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Three Pounds in My Pocket. He tells me his most significant achievements so far include not only the creation of an archive in his name at the University of Warwick Modern Records Centre on Communism in India, but also the construction of a skateboard park in his locality of Oedby, a facility for which he led the campaign with local teenagers with a view to encouraging their engagement in local politics. Raising funds for a skateboard park, he tells me, proved far more onerous than getting money for academic research. The thought of becoming the country's first professor of skateboard studies has crossed his mind. It would mean another inaugural, wouldn't it? As it is, though, he has opted for this SARS chair on international relations and development. Since I know Professor Gaurapal seeing as someone who is always in search of fresh challenges, I believe SARS is very fortunate to have attracted someone of his professional calibre, and I'm sure you're all looking forward as much as I am to hearing his inaugural lecture on the large and important theme of democracy and religious minorities in India, a long-term view. I'm not sure it's ridiculous for that generous introduction. I'm not sure it's fully deserved. I want to begin by welcoming everyone, especially those of you who have travelled far and wide, and a particular welcome to my friends from the LSE to the class of 79. This today is election day in India. 130 million people are voting, and on this day I remember my mother who voted for the last time in 2007. She was in a wheelchair, but she was very determined to vote, and it indicated to me not only her commitment to politics, but what the vote actually meant. So I dedicate this lecture to my late parents, both of them who passed away within a year of my appointment at SOAS, and I also want to thank my children. As Paul said, they have endured two previous inaugurals, and I hope this one is not as boring as the last two. When I was invited to give the inaugural lecture, I was very tempted to pull out one of my previous efforts. Then I thought, this is not going to work at SOAS. Someone will complain about myself plagiarising previous work. So what I've decided to do instead is to give you a flavour of my research, but also to reflect on the main question facing us today is what is going to happen in India in terms of the election, the critical election, and it's the relationship of India's democracy vis-a-vis religious minorities. The question of India's democracy and what kind of democracy it is has preoccupied my research, and I hope to provide a very clear answer in my forthcoming volume. I have in the past given a very emphatic response, which you will learn about shortly, but I think that was perhaps overstating the point. Anyway, we are in interesting times, and the elections will indicate whether my analysis, which was undertaken 20 years ago, has some relevance today or not. Okay. As India goes to the polls, global media attention is once more focused on the world's largest democracy. The spectacle of an election with an electorate of 814 million is a living testament to the triumph of the democratic idea in conditions generally considered inhospitable to its growth. India is unquestively the premier example of multicultural governance. It is the home of four world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, and after Indonesia and Pakistan has a third largest Muslim population, as well as ancient settlements of Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews. This religious diversity is also overlaid with complex divisions of caste, language, region and tribe, which make India probably the most socially diverse society in the world. Whereas multinational communist empires have imploded, resulting in vicious ethnic wars, or given away to new monoethnic states, the relative success of India's democracy continues to hold a fascination for students of comparative politics. India, as the adage goes, regularly defies the odds. However, these achievements, and they are not to be underestimated, also coexists with major blemishes. Poverty is one, pervasive corruption in public life is another. High levels of violence and discrimination suffered by some religious minorities, especially Muslims, but also at times Sikhs and Christians cast a dark shadow over the claims of ideal multicultural governance. Today, this shadow is clearly evident in the fears and anxieties of some religious minorities at the prospect of Narendra Modi becoming the next Prime Minister. In this lecture, I want to offer a long-term perspective on the experience of some of the religious minorities in India's democracy. I should perhaps add that in Indian politics, the term minorities normally refers to religious minorities, and of course all such minorities are not disadvantaged, as we saw recently in an exhibition on Zoroastrianism here at Sowers. I will make my argument by drawing on three phases in my own research, the partition of India, religious and ethnic conflicts in the 1980s and 90s, and more recently the efforts of the current government United Progressive Alliance since 2004 to implement a new deal for minorities. I will suggest that the experience of some of the religious minorities, notably Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, suggests that Indian democracy is locked into recurring patterns of outcomes from which it's difficult to escape. These patterns I want to further submit are a result of intentional constitutional design and intimately interlink to the idea of Indian nationhood at independence. In conclusion, I will offer some brief thoughts on how to interpret these outcomes. The partition of India, the partition of colonial India in August 1947 was a seminal event of modern South Asian history. It is important to remember that India and Pakistan began life as nation building failures. For Muhammad Gandhi, the long cherished dream of independence came with a cruel intersection of the country. For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Boundary Commissions Award gave him what he called a moth-eaten Pakistan. The violent tragedy that then ensued left a permanent imprint on the national consciousness of both states. The cojoined twins who seemed to have been cursed at birth. 66 years on, partition continues to provide a haunting reminder of what divides the two nuclear armed neighbours. For India, a Sanil Kilnani has eloquently put it, quote, partition is the unspeakable sadness at the heart of the idea of India. A momento mori, that what made India possible, also profoundly diminished the integral value of the idea, end of quote. For Pakistan, on the other hand, partition has become a shorthand for Renan's definition of a nation. As a daily ritual conducted at the Wagah border. I was poignantly reminded of this when I visited the closing ceremony at the Indian Pakistan border in Wagah on a trip to Lahore in 2006. Having been there from the Indian side in the early 80s as a research student and during a gap year in 1976, I was curious to see how Pakistanis responded to this well choreographed spectacle. You may be wondering what these two characters are up to. It's the closing of the border ceremony and certainly worth visiting and increasingly becoming one of the most popular tourist attractions in Amritsar and Lahore. The significance of the ceremony I think is little understood. If you were ever present there, you will appreciate the high tempo aggression, the symbolism and not least the Punjabi machismo associated with this act. It was for me quite enlightening to be on the inside of Pakistan rather than India. Afterwards, I wrote a short article in Seminine which I argued that if Pakistan had not existed, it would have had to be invented. The experience also led me to question my own commitment to Punjabi nationalism in which I had invested so much in my own academic life, including founding a journal on the subject. Anyway, returning to matters at hand and my work on partition. Partition was accompanied by unprecedented levels of violence which left a million dead and a forced migration of further 15 million. It was the largest movement of people in the 20th century and touched the lives of most people in India and Pakistan, including my own family. I'm firmly convinced that my parents generation never got over the trauma. Remarkably, there is still no memorial to those who died in the subcontinent's own unique Holocaust. One reason for this was probably that mass violence was central to the right sizing of India and Pakistan as envisaged by Congress and the Muslim League. Another that for both states, the partition also marked a closure, a new beginning in which there would be no more partitions. Subsequently, 1947 became the foundational myth for both states. For the Indian political elite, it was a permanent reminder of the destructive power of religious nationalism in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. For the Pakistani establishment in contrast, it was the ultimate price for a religious community determined to self-govern. Now it's generally agreed that partition enabled Congress to craft a constitution in its own image. But much of the party's thinking on the future constitutional design had developed since the 1920s with democracy, socialism, secularism and a strong state at the core of this vision. Time precludes a more detailed assessment of constitution making. For those interested here, I refer you to an excellent work by Rochna Bajpai on debating difference. But what I want to do here is just highlight four key features of the framing of religion and religious minorities by India's constitution makers. First, the highly unusual construction of state secularism as goodwill towards all religions to treat all religions equally, arguably institutionalized the classical Hindu idea of tolerance. Operatively, it created a structural imbalance because Hinduism, which represented more than 80% of the population, would inevitably be treated more equally than other traditions. In the absence of a USA or French-styled state secularism, therefore, a heavy burden was placed on secularism as an ideology. While great optimism was invested in the state's capacity to secularize wider society through an economic transformation. Second, state secularism, while it chimed with the dominant tradition, significantly limited religious minorities' claims to equal citizenship based on identity, severely curtailing their ability to act collectively on political matters. Third, the emphasis on national unity and a strong state created a national ideology around secularism and national integration, which ideologically disarmed religious minorities, particularly in the peripheral regions that had remained unreckled side to the division of the country. Externally, hostilities towards Pakistan would in the long term place the Muslims in a difficult predicament where their loyalty would be regularly questioned. Finally, the sharp distinction made by constitution makers between Hinduism and egalitarian faith traditions, namely Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Sikhism, excluded the followers of these faiths from the right to reservations in state employment, education and the legislatures. Reservations were to be limited exclusively to backward Hindu caste, and though in due course they would be extended reluctantly to Sikhs and Buddhists, Christians and Muslims would by in large remain outside the most prolific and sustained social development programme undertaken by the Indian state. In short, the long term consequences of framing religion within the post-colonial constitutional idea of India would be profound. It set religious minorities on pathways that would eventually clash with the pursuit of national unity and integration and also lead to the assertion of the Hindu right. The end result would be exclusion and communal violence, but also the questioning of what kind of democracy is India. However, despite the many Jeremiahs predict in the imminent demise of Indian democracy in the 1950s and 1960s, the constitutional settlement held. Under Nehru, who incidentally described himself as a last Englishman to rule India, the country skillfully negotiated the most dangerous decade, and unusually amongst decolonised states peacefully withdrew her provincial boundaries along linguistic lines. These years also saw the establishment of firm guidelines for dealing with demands from ethnic and religious groups as Nehru and the Congress party combined the functions of political leadership with political development. The late Indo-file Professor William Morris Jones was fond of describing the Nehruvian Congress as an Aristotelian party. While this accolade was probably unwarranted, the temples at which Nehru's India was encouraged to worship were dams, power generation plants and five-year plans. Official cultural policy, not least Bollywood, enthralled popular audiences with high modernity in which traditional norms were regularly transgressed. In rural India, on the other hand, religious and traditional beliefs proved far more tenacious than the secularists had imagined. Eugene Smith, who in the early 1960s undertook the most comprehensive assessment of the secular credentials of the Nehruvian state, afforded it only qualified approval. It was at best, he noted, an ideal that was being implemented in substantial measure. But secularism as state ideology, according to Smith, was unable to compete with the language of belonging steeped in religion. Nehru's qualities were distinctly lacking in his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who dominated Indian politics for almost two decades after his death. Indira Gandhi first conquered the Congress party and then destroyed it. She ruthlessly centralised power in New Delhi, where her flatterers and fawners ruled supreme. When in June 1975, Mrs Gandhi was found guilty of corrupt electoral practices by the High Court, she imposed a state of emergency, suspending the normal functioning of the constitution. Following the suspension of the emergency in 1977, Mrs Gandhi reconstituted the Congress as a personal ffeftum. And when she again returned to power in 1980, she had, as a cliché goes, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Her instinct for political survival was reflected in the further subversion of her father's ideals, a state secularism was made to work for the benefit of Congress by vilifying legitimate opposition demands. At the same time, Mrs Gandhi maneuvered the Congress to be the main beneficiary of the rising tide of Hindu Communalism. What proved to be Mrs Gandhi's last battle was a decision militarily to confront Sikh militants in Punjab. The Sikh agitation, which had assumed violent form in the early 80s, rekindled earlier claims of discrimination against the minority and stoked up the embers of Sikh nationalism and now turn to the second phase of my research, which has concentrated mostly on ethnic and religious violence in India in the 1980s and 1990s. In retrospect, three iconic images symbolise religious and ethnic conflict in India in the 1980s and 90s. The first was the entry into the Golden Temple in June 1984 of the Indian Army following the occupation by Sikh militants. Codenamed Operation Bluestar, the action led to the death of Mrs Gandhi, subsequent pogroms against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and a decade-long insurgency that cost over 35,000 lives. Operation Bluestar was recently in the news following the revelations that Mrs Gandhi's government had provided Indian authorities with support and advice in planning the Indian Army's action. Needless to say, the cabinet secretary's report exonerated Her Majesty's government of any direct involvement and added a rider that the Indian security forces would have done a better job if they had followed the advice of the SAAS officer. The second image was the demolition in 1992 of the Barbary Masjid Mosque, a mosque which had stood for 400 years. It was levelled to the ground by Hindu militants who had waged a campaign to construct a munder in its place because the site was believed to be the birthplace of Lord Ram. The campaign was ruthlessly exploited by the Hindu right through marches, demonstrations and direct action to remap and reinvent the nation in Hindu iconography, transforming the BJP into a national party of government. The third image is not so much as an image but a map. It highlights how India's peripheral regions were beset by growing ethnic and religious conflicts, which once again threatened to divide the country. In Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, the northeastern states bordring China, Bangladesh and Burma, separatist movements emerged with such intensity and violence that the national narrative of unity integrity of the country seemed increasingly threadbare. By conservative estimates, over 100,000 lives were lost in these regions during these two decades. Large areas in these territories still remain ungovernable or are heavily militarized. These images and the wider political social change that they represented appear to suggest that India was facing, as Atal Kohli noted, a serious crisis of governance. State secularism and the civic conception of nationhood, it seemed, had finally hollowed out in the face of the main cultural force in Indian society, Hinduism. So how was one to understand these developments? How was one to explain what the novelist Naipo called the million mutinies that were taking place? In ethnic conflict in India, I attempted to offer a reading which went against the grain of dominant scholarship in the field. This work was in part inspired as a result of my collaboration in a project funded by the Social Science Research Council on right sizing the state and the politics of moving borders. The question I wanted to answer was how a country like India, which is saturated in religion and governed by a secular elite, could sustain a civic conception of nationhood and state secularism without a core identity? Or to put it differently, what was the dominant ethnic group or statsfolk which held the Indian Federation together? Drawing on the historic cold influences of Hindu revivalism within Congress in the 19th century, partition, the ambiguities of Indian state secularism and the actual policies towards the religious minorities in the post-1947 period, I suggested there was an argument for considering Hinduism as a meta-ethnicity that was able to transcend linguistic, caste and geographical barriers because to quote the late Sir Niskelna, Hindus speak the same language even if they don't speak the same language. This meta-ethnicity was the efficient secret of Indian nation building. Accordingly, Indian democracy conformed neither to secularized majoritarianism where the state for example encourages a culturalization but allows ethnic groups to maintain ethnicity in the private sphere such as USA, nor ethnically accommodative consociatialism where ethnicity along with individual rights is recognized as a basis for organization of the state which acts as an arbiter between ethnic groups, for example Belgium. India in contrast appeared to resemble a third variant namely one which combined the extension of political and civil rights to individuals and collective rights to minorities with institutionalized dominance over the state by one of the ethnic groups. Whereas in some ethnic democracies for instance Israel this institutionalizes formal and explicit in others it's informal and implicit. In India the institutionalization of dominance arose from the unspoken assumptions about state secularism, the historical ascendancy of the Congress and its vision of modern India and the ever present threat of Hindu majoritarianism. Thus though religious minorities were granted individual and some collective rights such as Muslim personal law the recognition of these rights was very much predicated on tactical accommodation with hegemonic Hinduism. Although ethnic democracies can have most of the features of liberal democracies for the inclusive group their relationship with the excluded ethnic group is more problematic. At the extremes they resort to what is called violent control that is the overt use of force. Some more often than not practice the domination of the majority to ensure that an overt contest for state power by the subordinated group is either unthinkable or unworkable. This form of domination has been termed as hegemonic control because unlike violent control it combines element of coercion with some degree of consent that often underpins political and administrative structures. Hegemonic control can exist when the shells of democracies and is characterized by the use of coercive or co-optive rule to undermine ethnic challenges to state power. Not very far from here Northern Ireland during Stormont was an ideal example of hegemonic control. The idea of Indian democracy is an ethnic one in which hegemonic and violent control was exercised over non-Hindu minorities appear to provide a better match with the realities of 1980s and 1990s. Jammuyn Kashmir, Punjab, the northeastern states and the Muslims and Christians provided analytically appropriate cases for the study of these concepts. In the peripheral regions where Indian nation state building had struggled to take root there had long been a deep resentment against New Delhi at the erosion of political autonomy and civil rights often resulting in sustained insurgency. These regions were also the sites of several wars which had sacralised their territory deep into national consciousness. Here as elsewhere the Indian state was determined that there would be no more partitions. If the case for India as an ethnic democracy was relatively easy to make viewed from the regions then how was one to explain in the hinterland the ethnic call. Again putting a very difficult argument simply I suggested that the rise of the BJP was the inevitable alignment of political power with the main cultural force in Indian society. Congress had been able to thwart such a development through a combination of elite secularism and mass mobilisation by Mahatma Gandhi. After independence it relied heavily on the mythology of modernisation which brasses described as chapati in the sky. Once this mythology failed a new language of belonging was necessary. Thus the Neuruvian state managed the tensions between a multinational continental society and the desire to build a strong centralised state through majoritarianism hegemonic control and violent control. The post-Neuruvian state was engaged in a more overtly assimilationist project of building the Hindu nation. Perhaps inevitably the arguments in ethnic conflict in India were not well received in India. One reviewer accused me of flogging a dead horse. Another described it as a typical example of sinister neocolonial thinking. As such encouraged everybody in India to read the book. Needless to say despite the best efforts of the publisher to cash in on this endorsement the sales remained modest. Ethnic conflict in India was a product of its time but its central argument I would contend still has relevance today. India might not be an ethnic democracy but in the minds of the Hindu right ideologs there is no doubt this is what they want to accomplish. It might well be as Maurice Jones used to say that India's natural social diversity will forever frustrate such an outcome. However even if Modi and the BJP are vanquished in the elections the constituency which they represent will remain a powerful political force that will continue to determine the fortunes of religious minorities. I now come to the third phase and the final phase of my research in Indian politics it covers the most recent period with special reference to the current government. In the case of India this work has focused on the agenda of the Congress led UPA which came to power in 2004 under Manmohan Singh with the manifestor commitment to provide full equality of opportunities to religious minorities especially Muslims. I want to acknowledge here fully that this work has been extended as a result of my collaboration with Lawrence and Rochina Bajpai who also works in the politics department. Finally my research student Hewon Kim who has done pioneering research into the complex and tangled processes of UPA's policy making towards Muslims. The election of a Congress led UPA government under the Oxbridge educated Manmohan Singh was viewed as a rejection of divisive Hindu nationalist policies of the BJP. Singh who was accredited with being the architect of India's economic reforms would widely seen as a consensus politician who would restore Nehruvian values and address the going alienation of religious minorities especially India's sizable Muslim population. One of the landmark publications produced by the UPA was a social economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India produced by a commission chaired by Rajinder Satya. Unremarkably the report found very poor representation of Muslims in state governance and employment both at the national and state levels, a dismal provision for education, infrastructure and security in areas of Muslim settlement, a virtual boycott by financial services and Muslim enterprises and a widespread perception among Muslims of religious discrimination resulting in ghettoization and an inward looking community. Whereas most religious and backward caste communities had shown a noticeable improvement on key performance indicators such as education and income, similar evidence for Muslims was difficult to find. As the commission concluded the community exhibits deficits and deprivation in practically all dimensions of development. In response to these findings the UPA government launched a series of policy initiatives which included the use of executive action to improve minorities representation in state sector employment. Special programs were also launched to enhance service delivery. Probably the most radical proposal was that reservations in employment and education limited traditionally to backward Hindu caste be opened up to poor Christians and Muslims. This proposal was part of a broader policy initiative to build a level playing field for all social groups by creating a new overarching equality of opportunity, not to dissimilar from the changes introduced in the UK by the Equalities Act of 2010. Such a framework included an Equal Opportunities Commission and a novel institution or approach called the Diversity Index to measure the degree of social diversity of institutions. Taken together these policy initiatives amounted to nothing short of a paradigm shift in the existing regime of competing equal opportunities. Yet within three years of UPA's election most of these policy initiatives were placed on the back burner. Why? Political considerations are important but they only provide a partial answer. Opposition emanated from three major sources. First, interestingly, it came from the reservations lobbies associated with backward caste, the scheduled cast, scheduled tribes and the OBCs. These groups have been the main beneficiaries of India's reservation system. They have their own exclusive regimes of anti-discrimination legislation and institutional support and as such were unwilling to concede on hard-won concessions. Thus the proposal to include poor Christians and Muslims in the reservation system was firmly rejected. Similarly, the Equal Opportunities Bill was ultimately watered down so that its remit would ironically apply to religious minorities only. A fact confirmed by Salman Kurshid during his recent visit to Sowas. Neither the Equal Opportunities Commission nor the Diversity Index appealed to the Dalit groups. Second, opposition was also strongly rooted in state structures which since independence have become rootinised to treating minority demands as religious and therefore beyond the realms of public policy in a secular state. Time precludes a more detailed assessment of this important area that has remained largely under-researched. Again, recent data on recruitment practices of central and state governments confirms the high levels of institutionalised discrimination against some religious minorities, especially Muslims. Not a naturally, many of the UPA's initiatives therefore were either poorly implemented or deliberately frustrated by state structures and provincial governments. Interestingly, one of the state governments which consistently opposed these measures was in Gujarat led by Narendra Modi. Finally, opposition more equally than other traditions. In the absence of a USA or French-styled state secularism, therefore, a heavy burden was placed on secularism as an ideology. While great optimism was invested in the state's capacity to secularise wider society through an economic transformation. Second, state secularism, while it chimed with the dominant tradition, significantly limited religious minorities' claims to equal citizenship based on identity, severely curtailing their ability to act collectively on political matters. Third, the emphasis on national unity and a strong state created a national ideology around secularism and national integration, which ideologically disarmed religious minorities, particularly in the peripheral regions that had remained unreckled side to the division of the country. Externally, hostilities towards Pakistan would in the long term place the Muslims in a difficult predicament where their loyalty would be regularly questioned. Finally, the sharp distinction made by constitution makers between Hinduism and egalitarian faith traditions, namely Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Sikhism, excluded the followers of these faiths from the right to reservations in state employment, education and the legislatures. Reservations were to be limited exclusively to backward Hindu caste, and though in due course they would be extended reluctantly to Sikhs and Buddhists, Christians and Muslims would by and large remain outside the most prolific and sustained social development programme undertaken by the Indian state. In short, the long-term consequences of framing religion within the post-colonial constitutional idea of India would be profound. It set religious minorities on pathways that would eventually clash with the pursuit of national unity and integration and also lead to the assertion of the Hindu right. The end result would be the exclusion and communal violence, but also the questioning of what kind of democracy is India. However, despite the many Jeremiahs predicted in the imminent demise of Indian democracy in the 1950s and 1960s, the constitutional settlement held. Under Nehru, who incidentally described himself as a last Englishman to rule India, the country skillfully negotiated the most dangerous decade and unusually amongst decolonised states peacefully redrew her provincial boundaries along linguistic lines. These years also saw the establishment of firm guidelines for dealing with demands from ethnic and religious groups as Nehru and the Congress party combined the functions of political leadership with political development. The late Indo-file Professor William Morris Jones was fond of describing the Nehruvian Congress as an Aristotelian party. While this accolade was probably unwarranted, the temples at which Nehru's India was encouraged to worship were dams, power generation plants and five-year plants. Official cultural policy, not least Bollywood, enthralled popular audiences with high modernity in which traditional norms were regularly transgressed. In rural India, on the other hand, religious and traditional beliefs proved far more tenacious than the secularists had imagined. Eugene Smith, who in the early 1960s undertook the most comprehensive assessment of the secular credentials of the Nehruvian state, afforded it only qualified approval. It was at best, he noted, an ideal that was being implemented in substantial measure. But secularism as a state ideology, according to Smith, was unable to compete with the language of belonging steeped in religion. Nehru's qualities were distinctly lacking in his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who dominated Indian politics for almost two decades after his death. Indira Gandhi first conquered the Congress party and then destroyed it. She ruthlessly centralised power in New Delhi, where her flatterers and foreigners ruled supreme. When in June 1975, Mrs Gandhi was found guilty of corrupt electoral practices by the High Court, she imposed a state of emergency, suspending the normal functioning of the constitution. Following the suspension of the emergency in 1977, Mrs Gandhi reconstituted the Congress as a personal ffifthum, and when she again returned to power in 1980, she had, as a cliché goes, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Her instinct for political survival was reflected in the further subversion of her father's ideals, a state secularism was made to work for the benefit of Congress by vilifying legitimate opposition demands. At the same time, Mrs Gandhi manuwered the Congress to be the main beneficiary of the rising tide of Hindu Communalism. What proved to be Mrs Gandhi's last battle was a decision militarily to confront Sikh militants in Punjab. The Sikh agitation, which had assumed violent form in the early 80s, rekindled earlier claims of discrimination against the minority, and stoked up the embers of Sikh nationalism, and now turn to the second phase of my research, which has concentrated mostly on ethnic and religious violence in India in the 1980s and 1990s. In retrospect, three iconic images symbolise religious and ethnic conflict in India in the 1980s and 90s. The first was the entry into the Golden Temple in June 1984 of the Indian Army following the occupation by Sikh militants. Codenamed Operation Bluestar, the action led to the death of Mrs Gandhi, subsequent pogroms against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, and a decade-long insurgency that cost over 35,000 lives. Operation Bluestar was recently in the news following the revelations that Mrs Gandhi's government had provided Indian authorities with support and advice in planning the Indian Army's action. It was needless to say the cabinet secretary's report exonerated Her Majesty's government of any direct involvement and added a rider that the Indian security forces would have done a better job if they had followed the advice of the SAAS officer. The second image was the demolition in 1992 of the Barbary Masjid Mosque, a mosque which had stood for 400 years. It was levelled to the ground by Hindu militants who had waged a campaign to construct a munder in its place because the site was believed to be the birthplace of Lord Ram. The campaign was ruthlessly exploited by the Hindu right through marches, demonstrations and direct action to remap and reinvent the nation in Hindu iconography, transforming the BJP into a national party of government. The third image is not so much as an image but a map. It highlights how India's peripheral regions were beset by growing ethnic and religious conflicts, which once again threatened to divide the country. In Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, the northeastern states bordring China, Bangladesh and Burma, separatist movements emerged with such intensity and violence that the national narrative of unity and integrity of the country seemed increasingly threadbare. By conservative estimates, over 100,000 lives were lost in these regions during these two decades. Large areas in these territories still remain ungovernable or are heavily militarized. These images and the wider political social change that they represented appear to suggest that India was facing, as Atal Kohli noted, a serious crisis of governance. State secularism and the civic conception of nationhood, it seemed, had finally hollowed out in the face of the main cultural force in Indian society, Hinduism. So how was one to understand these developments? How was one to explain what the novelist Nipole called the million mutinies that were taking place? In ethnic conflict in India, I attempted to offer a reading which went against the grain of dominant scholarship in the field. This work was in part inspired as a result of my collaboration in a project funded by the Social Science Research Council on rightsizing the state and the politics of moving borders. The question I wanted to answer was how a country like India, which is saturated in religion and governed by a secular elite, could sustain a civic conception of nationhood and state secularism without a core identity? Or to put it differently, what was the dominant ethnic group or statsfolk which held the Indian Federation together? Drawing on the historic cold influences of Hindu revivalism within Congress in the 19th century, partition, the ambiguities of Indian state secularism and the actual policies towards the religious minorities in the post-1947 period, I suggested there was an argument for considering Hinduism as a meta-ethnicity that was able to transcend linguistic, caste and geographical barriers because to quote the late Sir Niskelna, Hindus speak the same language even if they don't speak the same language. This meta-ethnicity was the efficient secret of Indian nation building. Accordingly, Indian democracy conformed neither to secularized majoritarianism, where the state for example encourages a culturalization but allows ethnic groups to maintain ethnicity in the private sphere such as USA, nor ethnically accommodative consociatialism where ethnicity along with individual rights is recognized as a basis for organization of the state which acts as an arbiter between ethnic groups, for example Belgium. India in contrast appeared to resemble a third variant, namely one which combined the extension of political and civil rights to individuals and collective rights to minorities with institutionalized dominance over the state by one of the ethnic groups. Whereas in some ethnic democracies, for instance Israel, this institutionalizes formal and explicit, in others it's informal and implicit. In India the institutionalization of dominance arose from the unspoken assumptions about state secularism, the historical ascendancy of the Congress and its vision of modern India and the ever present threat of Hindu majoritarianism. Thus though religious minorities were granted individual and some collective rights such as Muslim personal law, the recognition of these rights was very much predicated on tactical accommodation with hegemonic Hinduism. Although ethnic democracies can have most of the features of liberal democracies for the inclusive group, their relationship with the excluded ethnic group is more problematic. At the extremes they resort to what is called violent control, that is the overt use of force. Some more often than not practice the domination of the majority to ensure that an overt contest for state power by the subordinated group is either unthinkable or unworkable. This form of domination has been termed as hegemonic control because unlike violent control it combines elements of coercion with some degree of consent that often underpins political and administrative structures. Hegemonic control can exist when the shells of democracies and is characterized by the use of coercive or co-optive rule to undermine ethnic challenges to state power. Not very far from here, Northern Ireland during Stormont was an ideal example of hegemonic control. The idea of Indian democracy as an ethnic one in which hegemonic and violent control was exercised over non-Hindu minorities appeared to provide a better match with the realities of 1980s and 1990s. Jammuyn Kashmir, Punjab, the North Eastern states and the Muslims and Christians provided analytically appropriate cases for the study of these concepts. In the peripheral regions where Indian nation state building had struggled to take root there had long been a deep resentment against New Delhi at the erosion of political autonomy and civil rights often resulting in sustained insurgencies. These regions were also the sites of several wars which had sacredized their territory deep into national consciousness. Here, as elsewhere, the Indian state was determined that there would be no more partitions. If the case for India as an ethnic democracy was relatively easy to make viewed from the regions then how was one to explain in the hinterland the ethnic core? Again putting a very difficult argument simply I suggested that the rise of the BJP was the inevitable alignment of political power with the main cultural force in Indian society. Congress had been able to thwart such a development through a combination of elite secularism and mass mobilization by Mahatma Gandhi. After independence it relied heavily on the mythology of modernization which brasses described as chapati in the sky. Once this mythology failed a new language of belonging was necessary. Thus the Neuruvian state managed the tensions between a multinational continental society and the desire to build a strong centralized state through majoritarianism, hegemonic control and violent control. The post-Neuruvian state was engaged in a more overtly assimilationist project of building the Hindu nation. Perhaps inevitably the arguments advanced in ethnic conflict in India were not well received in India. One reviewer accused me of flogging a dead horse. Another described it as a typical example of sinister neocolonial thinking and as such encouraged everybody in India to read the book. Needless to say despite the best efforts of the publisher to cash in on this endorsement the sales remained modest. Ethnic conflict in India was a product of its time but its central argument I would contend still has relevance today. India might not be an ethnic democracy but in the minds of the Hindu right ideologs there is no doubt this is what they want to accomplish. It might well be as Maurice Jones used to say that India's natural social diversity will forever frustrate such an outcome. However even if Modi and the BJP are vanquished in the elections the constituency which they represent will remain a powerful political force that will continue to determine the fortunes of religious minorities. I now come to the third phase and the final phase of my research in Indian politics. It covers the most recent period with special reference to the current government. In the case of India this work has focused on the agenda of the Congress led UPA which came to power in 2004 under Manmohan Singh with the manifesto commitment to provide full equality of opportunities to religious minorities especially Muslims. I want to acknowledge here fully that this work has been extended as a result of my collaboration with Lawrence and Rochina Bajpai who also works in the politics department. Finally my research student Hewon Kim who has done pioneering research into the complex and tangled processes of UPA's policy making towards Muslims. The election of a Congress led UPA government under the Oxbridge educated Manmohan Singh was viewed as a rejection of divisive Hindu nationalist policies of the BJP. Singh who was accredited with being the architect of India's economic reforms would widely seen as a consensus politician who would restore Nehruvian values and address the going alienation of religious minorities especially India's sizable Muslim population. One of the landmark publications produced by the UPA was a social economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India produced by a commission chaired by Rajinder Satya. Unremarkably the report found very poor representation of Muslims in state governance and employment both at the national and state levels. A dismal provision for education infrastructure and security in areas of Muslim settlement. A virtual boycott by financial services and Muslim enterprises. And a widespread perception among Muslims of religious discrimination resulting in ghettoization and an inward looking community. Whereas most religious and backward caste communities had shown a noticeable improvement on key performance indicators such as education and income. Similar evidence for Muslims was difficult to find. As the commission concluded the community exhibits deficits and deprivation in practically all dimensions of development. In response to these findings the UPA government launched a series of policy initiatives which included the use of executive action to improve minorities representation in state sector employment. Special programs were also launched to enhance service delivery. Probably the most radical proposal was that reservations in employment and education limited traditionally to backward Hindu caste be opened up to poor Christians and Muslims. This proposal was part of a broader policy initiative to build a level playing field for all social groups by creating a new overarching equality of opportunity. Not too dissimilar from the changes introduced in the UK by the Equalities Act of 2010. Such a framework included a Nickel Opportunities Commission and a novel institution or approach called the Diversity Index to measure the degree of social diversity of institutions. Taken together these policy initiatives amounted to nothing short of a paradigm shift in the existing regime of competing equal opportunities. Yet within three years of UPA's election most of these policy initiatives were placed on the back burner. Why? Political considerations are important but they only provide a partial answer. Opposition emanated from three major sources. First, interestingly, it came from the reservation lobbies associated with backward caste, the scheduled caste, scheduled tribes and the OBCs. These groups have been the main beneficiaries of India's reservation system. They have their own exclusive regimes of anti-discrimination legislation and institutional support and as such were unwilling to concede on hard won concessions. Thus the proposal to include poor Christians and Muslims in the reservation system was firmly rejected. Similarly the Equal Opportunities Bill was ultimately watered down so that its remit would ironically apply to religious minorities only. A fact confirmed by Salman Kurshid during his recent visit to SOAS. Neither the Equal Opportunities Commission nor the Diversity Index appealed to the Dalit groups. Second, opposition was also strongly rooted in state structures which since independence have become rootinised to treating minority demands as religious and therefore beyond the realms of public policy in a secular state. Time precludes a more detailed assessment of this important area that has remained largely under-researched. Again, recent data on recruitment practices of central and state governments confirms the high levels of institutionalised discrimination against some religious minorities, especially Muslims. Not a naturally, many of the UPA's initiatives therefore were either poorly implemented or deliberately frustrated by state structures and provincial governments. Interestingly, one of the state governments which consistently opposed these measures was in Gujarat led by Narendra Modi. Finally, opposition was also forcefully voiced by the BJP and the Allied Hindutva forces, but included a significant lobby within Congress. Ostensibly, this constituency views itself as a custodian of the constitutional settlement. But the focus of its resistance was to protect the narrow ideological construction of caste as the exclusive signifier of Hinduism. Interestingly, this lobby insisted that the idea of extending reservations to poor Christians and Muslims would leave few incentives for poor Hindus to remain within the fold of Hinduism. Implicitly, the state had to remain as a guardian of religious boundaries. It could ill afford to bargain away the limited incentives it had at its disposal. Exactly a decade after coming to power with the promise of delivering full equality of opportunity to religious minorities, the UPA's record remains unconvincing. Despite the broad range of programs, recent data suggests that there has been limited improvement in the condition of India's Muslims, and if anything, it has further deteriorated at a time when all other religious and caste communities are improving. Mindful of these accusations, in February 2013, the government announced the creation of another high-powered committee to evaluate the effectiveness of its policies. But perhaps the most serious indictment of the UPA's breach of faith is not its inability to deliver on promises but its failure to control communal violence, the first and essential duty of a state. In August last year, in the worst act of communal violence since Gujarat 2002, nearly 50 people were killed and 50,000 Muslims made homeless in the district of Mazafundagar in Uttar Pradesh. This was not just a local state difficulty. The violence, as invariably with communal violence in India, was a prelude to key parties positioning themselves for these elections. Congress and its partners actions and indeed inactions contributed in large measure to the largest rural displacement or minority community in decades. OK, to conclude, the 16th Luxabae elections that are being held currently could have profound implications for the future of India's democracy and the place of religious minorities within it. The puzzle this lecture has tried to answer is why, 66 years after independence and almost a century since democratisation first began under the Raj, the world's oldest developing democracy has struggled to deliver on the promise of equal citizenship for some religious minorities, most notably Muslims. Why did the UPA with the best of intentions struggled to perform? Most standard political science explanations ascribe these outcomes to electoral incentives or the fear of the majority or to put it in other terms that which drove the Muslim League to pursue the state of Pakistan. In contrast, in ethnic conflict in India, I argued that such outcomes were inevitable because India was a de facto ethnic democracy. In short, that the constitutional design had built in it a system of ethnic closure. In retrospect, I now realise that my argument was perhaps crafted too polemically in response to the dominant discourses in Indian politics. Whether India is an ethnic democracy or not is something that will become quite clear very soon. Finally, in order to answer the question why the promise of India's democracy continues to elude some religious minorities, the experience of the UPA government is also instructive. If there is a lesson here, it is one that we need to refocus our gaze towards understanding the long-term implications of India's post-colonial constitutional design. One outstanding achievement of Indian democracy in the last two decades has been the political and the increasing social and economic integration of Dalits. Reservations for all their shortcomings have delivered. In this sense, constitution-making was clearly a critical juncture which set the template for institutional path dependency for the disadvantaged Hindu caste, providing ever-increasing returns to the political formations that negotiated this settlement. The divergent paths which Dalits and poor Christians and Muslim communities of the same social background have followed since 1950s points to a major, inerasable cleavage at the heart of the idea of modern Indian nationhood. Among the many pressing challenges which will confront the new government, how to develop institutions and structures which can effectively deliver for the seriously disadvantaged religious minorities is one that can only be ignored at its peril. Thank you. I want to give thanks to his children who are undoubtedly the guests of honour in this event. You have no idea how much you mean to him, and it is a great honour to see that you are here to see him. It is a great honour as well that he has selected me to give this bowl of thanks, since there are many people in this audience who have known Gurhapa for much longer and who are much more eloquent than I am. Given that I am a partner in crime where he has selected me to do what they say in the subcontinent to do the needsful and to warn you. I should warn you, however, that I am not sorely qualified to undertake this task. I am not particularly a humble person. It is just that I have just arrived from Sydney and I am not quite there mentally. So this is why I have written the notes. I will try to give it a best shot. I first came across Gurhapa almost a decade ago, most likely over a beer. We spent a lot of time discussing things that saw us over beers. I asked him to contribute to a volume in the BJP-led government at the time. This has a direct link to the forthcoming elections. Subsequently, we edited the new dimensions of Indian politics together and now we are working on a research proposal, including a long-term project on election integrity in India. It is one of the reasons why I went to Sydney to sign up to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the election integrity project. It is one of the global projects that is going to be a cutting edge of political science over the next decade. So, us will be a centrepiece of the research agenda. The project has been developed to make a theoretical and empirical advancement in our understanding of election integrity. It aims to provide an original contribution by connecting social, structural, institutional and actor-central explanations and by focusing on national variations within India. We will be using, analysing elections in India and to determine how much electoral integrity they have at the assembly level. In a decade or so of working with Gurhapa, what has come to admire of him is his dedication to Indian politics, which he has demonstrated today here as well. The passion he brings and his boundless energy as an organiser. Gurhapa can be a very demanding individual. He also can be a very frustrating individual to work with sometimes. Nonetheless, I appreciate his candor, his directness. I'm a Castilian by origin and so I guess in a sense I am a Punjabi and I appreciate the directness that Punjabis and Castilians share. It's not appreciated many times in academia, which is filled with backstabbers, but at least Gurhapa is what Americans call a straight shooter and I appreciate that from him. Moreover, his commitment, generosity and support for his students is never in doubt. Most recently I went to Moscow with my son and I met some of his former students and what I appreciate is the ability of the students to develop their own research agendas, sometimes in interdisciplinary nature. The loyalty that his former students have and demonstrate for Gurhapa is unrivaled. Chris has already outlined Gurhapa's academic achievement, so I will not repeat them here again, but I will concentrate on the lecture. Gurhapa, today you have truly given us much food for thought. As India votes and we await the outcome of the elections with Vated Breath, your analysis of how Indian democracy has struggled to provide full citizenship of some religious groups provides us with a clear insight in how the electionist will be determined. The phenomenon of Narendra Modi and the BJP is incomprehensible without the political terrain that you have so carefully and meticulously mapped. To put it bluntly, the future of Indian democracy is intimately interlinked with how religious minorities are treated. It cannot be but otherwise. Indian politics are not easily comprehensible either for the experts or the non-specialists. Today in his brief lecture, Gurhapa, you have given a masterful overview of Indian democracy since 1947, with some remarkably original and in some cases controversial insights into the legacy of constitutional settlement continues to determine contemporary outcomes. I briefly want to say a few words about the three themes on which you have structured your lecture. Those of us who know Gurhapa's work will have gathered for him the study of the partition is not merely a subject, but a lifelong obsession. He and Ian Talbot have pioneered Punjab studies and many of the observations Gurhapa has drawn up on today are based on decades of painstaking scholarship. Gurhapa, through your work on the partition and Punjab studies, you have given us rich insights into nation and state building failures in India and Pakistan. The politics of what you call right and wrong sizing the state and more recently how collective violence in 1947 shaped state formation. Rarely the scholarship in my view combines such broad sweep with in-depth historical knowledge of the subject. Turning to your analysis of ethnic and religious conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, there's much here that I and many other political scientists working on India would basically disagree. Sometimes this is the part of being in academics to disagree with others. However, no standing or differences, the clarity and force openness with which you make your argument in ethnic conflict in India particular, the range of its coverage and again the historical knowledge that you bring to your subject matter requires that your voice must be heard. India, as you correctly say in your critical self-reflection, may not be an ethnic democracy. However, if Narendra Modi and the BJP win with a clear mandate it might well become one. Finally, in your analysis of the UPA's policies towards India's religious minorities, especially Muslims, you have drawn attention to policy formation and policy failure and the need to place it within the framework of historical institutionalism associated with path dependency. As we begin to review the record of the UPA's record decade of power, you and your students are surely on the right path in asserting that the government's shortcomings and curious cannot be understood by political explanations alone. That is, the fear and cost of losing elections or the compulsions of operating in a coalition. By asking us to turn our gaze once more to the institutional study of Indian politics, you are redrawing our attention to the founding fathers of the discipline, people like W.H. Morris Jones, who held that institutions were the efficient secret of how Indian politics were. To sum up, Gurhapal, I'm sure that I speak on behalf of the audience when I say that today we have heard an outstanding lecture eloquently delivered and thought-provoking in its content. These are the hallmarks of your style and we want to thank you. As a friend, as an academic collaborator, in my view, as a brother-in-arms, I do sincerely hope that you're not permanently lost to the arid field of senior academic management. The green fields of Punjab and Indian politics is still a way to, and this is where your scholarship is badly missed. We thank you, Gurhapal. Please give him a round of applause.